Tell me about the forest, not the individual trees. Which is to say that I am always drawn to comments which give me a big picture understanding of why things are the way they are. Take the Interstate Bridge replacement and freeway widening projects. My eyes go over all the text BikePortland has published. I look at the diagrams. But, frustratingly, I don’t retain the information. I’m not proud of that.
But what helps me are comments like what ITOTS wrote this week, into Jonathan’s interview with Je Amaichi on the Interstate Bridge freeway project. ITOTS brings up Metro, and its Regional Travel Demand Model, and goes on to say that it is this model which says we need a $10B freeway expansion, and which gives “cover” to the DOTs. S/he ends with a link to a Jarret Walker blog post.
Metro’s Regional Travel Demand model wasn’t on my radar, but it sure gives me an understanding of the larger problem. And it’s those nuggets of insight which keep folks reading the BP comments sections.
Here’s what ITOTS had to say:
When it comes to the DEIS, Amaechi said the over-arching concern is its “defeatist way of thinking.” In other words, she thinks it assumes the status quo of car and truck-centric transportation will exist well into the future (projects and models in the DEIS are based on 2045)…“This idea that we’re alleviating congestion by adding lanes is something that has been disproven many, many times,” she added. “And in fact, the opposite has been proven to be true. Induced demand is slightly mentioned [in the DEIS], but it’s not addressed in a realistic way.”
Two things:
First, even without any projected growth in traffic, the DOTs/IBR can and would determine that for safety and operational reasons they require the new auxiliary lanes. They can make a case for auxiliary/merge lanes based on close spacing of interchanges, short merge distances, and grades alone. Given the ultimate judge is Federal Highways they would easily win any dispute there. The DOTs don’t even need to have a fight about whether or not induced demand exists or is accounted for because they don’t have to rely on increased traffic volumes to justify their wider design.Second, it’s actually Metro that allows/requires them to build a wider highway. Metro maintains the regional travel demand model and the list of projects and programs that go into it. When the impact of all of the region’s planned projects and programs are tallied up, Metro’s travel demand model is still saying that auto traffic is going to increase across the Columbia river by year 2045 (or pretty much any other year in the future) such that doing nothing leads to carmaggedon. IBR is required to plan to accommodate that predicted future, to study the impacts of not doing so (which is part of what is in the SDEIS), and to design a facility that meets DOT mobility standards—hours of congestion on the main line, level of service at intersections.
So go tell Metro to fix its modeling, principally by adding projects and programs that get the region to the mobility, safety, and sustainability outcomes we want without these kinds of mega projects—at least inside the reductive reality of the model. And then fund the projects that are going to get people to move around the region differently. It’s Metro’s model that tells us we need this $10B project. That’s all the cover the DOTs need. Making plans to bring about a future that you say you don’t actually want to come to pass is absurd. But thems the rules (currently).
There are other (saner and still rigorous) ways.
Thank you ITOTS. It’s hard to stay abreast of those projects, so your bigger picture helps. You can read ITOTS comment under the original post.
Thanks for reading.
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my 2 cents
Why build an additional car bridge to Washington? You hoping to increase SOV reliance and mode share?
Why would you replace existing rail lines with buses? Once built, rail is much more efficient to operate and much higher capacity than buses. Rail infrastructure is more expensive to build, but it would be stupid to stop using existing rail lines that are already in place.
The argument for not building rail on the I-5 bridge replacement would be consistent with the desires of some conservative Washington politicians to maximize roadway capacity on a new bridge and to not spend any money on dedicated rail or pedestrian infrastructure. In that context, this comment just reads like a typical local republican grievance list, or the wish list of someone who lives in Washington to take advantage of low taxes and property values, and who commutes to Oregon for low tax shopping or work. I don’t think we should be saddling tax payers with paying for the infrastructure that facilitates the lifestyles of people who are seeking maximum tax avoidance and maximum externalities.
i’m no republican, but I’ve seen what a waste of money the MAX trains have been over the years and realize how the money that was wasted on them could have built an over the top awesome bus network.
But hey, Goldschmidt and his buddies (primarily construction company owners) saw a way to make huge profits at the tax payers expense and they’ve been taking us for a ride (ha ha) ever since.
To this day, we are still paying.
Down with the trains and yeah for more flexible buses!
so you’re saying that the region should have invested in more street running buses instead of building rail? I know the Max has plenty of problems, but I don’t see how that would be a better solution. And trolly buses on dedicated guideways aren’t too much cheaper to build and operate than trains are.
If your city isn’t well-served by a rail transit system, it’s too sprawled to have meaningful non-car mode share of any type. That’s why Portland–and LA, Phoenix, etc.–aren’t transit cities, despite the presence of higher-capacity transit modes. Especially given the obvious and latent demand for being within Metro Portland–people are willing to pay more to live in e.g., NE Portland than e.g. Vernonia–the solution to the MAX’s low ridership is to dramatically redevelop areas around MAX stations for higher density.
“It’s stupid to rebuild cities around their transportation; we can’t do it”; the entire 20th century would like to have a word with you.
It’s laughable to throw Los Angeles in with Phoenix as not a transit city. LA Metro is the second busiest transit system in the country, and Los Angeles is the densest urbanized area in the country. When I was in LA last winter, every bus I rode was packed and so were most of the trains. Of course, it’s LA so the buses were stuck in traffic and the train took forever to get through the areas around USC where it didn’t seem to have signal priority, but the ridership and demand is absolutely there.
Different magnitudes of “not transit city”, but mode share for transit in both places in both places is >10%; car mode share is ~80%. Contrast this with places like NYC, Chicago, Philly, Boston, where transit is at least 1/3 of commuters (obviously NYC is the outlier, almost 60%), and the difference is hard to deny.
Density isn’t everything, something I’ve come to appreciate all the more living in the PNW versus New England. Density drops off much more quickly outside of central cities here in the west than the northeast; a 12km circle dropped on downtown LA has only about half as many people as one dropped on Midtown Manhattan (that’s with Bay taking up half of NYC’s bubble).
How density is structured is at least important; if there are no major nodes of density to connect–if people aren’t largely trying to get to or from particular areas, but rather are trying to get everywhere equally– you either need extremely high density (think Shanghai, in particular), or you’re not going to have significant transit ridership, and people will use cars to get around.
A few notes on that data: place based data is not very useful for understanding urban areas, especially if one of those places is Los Angeles. The LA city limits are one of the dumbest things about the place. My preferred geographical region to compare is Urbanized Area, even if it has a sort of inconsistent exact definition across time. Of course, this brings LA down to just 3.5%, which doesn’t exactly make my point much stronger but that’s about half of Philadelphia’s 6.9% and more than double Phoenix’s 1.4%.
Los Angeles is probably the most polycentric major city in the US, but it’s pretty dense throughout. Using the same circle tool with a 15km radius, you can click almost anywhere in the 80 miles between the San Fernando Valley and San Bernardino and get a population of >1M. In New York, a similar distance spans New Brunswick to Bridgeport; a 15km radius around White Plains has ~500k people. To be clear, this isn’t a good thing per se, it’s just why LA is the densest urbanized area in the county.
Generally, the issue as I see it with transit in LA is speed – not land use. The regional rail options are too infrequent and only serve downtown well, while the light rail and subway are both too slow and not extensive enough. There are lots of reasons for this, but southern California history is a bit outside my wheelhouse (though every day I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about the demise of the Pacific Electric).
Yeah, it’s so frustrating and such short term thinking. This is one of the things I’m so angry with Kotek et al for chipping away at the urban growth boundary. We categorically do not lack space for housing within the current boundary. We don’t even lack space within the urban “core”. We have empty lots all over, empty office buildings, small single family homes, demand for apartments. But the only thing that can seemingly be fathomed to increase “affordable” housing is to sprawl out into the hinterlands. And it’s going to be massively expensive and the housing not affordable.
Agreed, and the land once developed in the hinterlands is lost for the foreseeable future as green places.
And lots of empty studio apartments downtown. (12% vacancy rate as of this spring)
Most people want single family housing (an apartment is no substitute), and they’ll go to the hinterlands to get it if they can’t find it in the city.
Indeed, real estate speculation sure drives up prices to unreasonable levels! The reason those apartments are empty is because they’re too expensive.
This is what I keep saying! Thank you!
People generally prefer to live in single family houses, not dense apartment blocks. Every house that gets demolished and replaced by apartments represents another family moving to the suburbs. Thanks to leaders like Kotek, we’re still adding land for houses out on the fringes, pushing the sprawl ever further into our farmland and rural areas. Meanwhile, people in the densifying inner core still aren’t using transit much.
And an apartment full of people living in the city. Or even half full! If only two units are occupied it’s better than the single family it replaced.
That depends on where those people would be living if not there. If you suppose they’d be renting apartments in Damascus, you’re probably right. If they’d be living in some of the empty apartments downtown, probably wrong.
Why?
Because urban density is what makes efficient and low emission transit possible.
The two units example is an exaggeration, because if you have an apartment building replacing a house or two, it’s very unlikely you’ll only get two tenants.
It’s one thing to want to increase density, or to acknowledge why there are benefits to that. It’s another to say two apartment units are better than the one house they replaced.
In fact, that’s been a problem with Portland’s planning efforts, which often makes the same mistake–believing that two units are automatically better than one. It’s why there are zoning incentives to tear down a house that may house several people (a family, or roommates) and replace it with two apartments that may house one or at most two people each, with the result being a net DROP in human (as opposed to unit) density.
The mistake gets even worse if you then add that the two units that replaced the house EACH cost more than the house.
I think you’re being pedantic for the sake of it. Whole apartment buildings aren’t being inhabited by two people. The point is single occupancy housing doesn’t have the density required to make a really functional, bikeable, efficient city.
And the fact that some apartments are more expensive than the (probably shoddy) house they replaced is just a fact that no amount of market based solution nonsense is ever going to fix.
I was responding to your comment that an apartment building is better than the house it replaced even if only two units are rented.
The reason I bothered was–like I wrote–that that same “two is better than one” flawed reasoning has resulted in poorly considered regulations that have had bad results.
Oh look, another thing you keep saying….Existence of evidence is not evidence of existence. It’s hard to say “people prefer X” when, for most of a place’s history, people have had no choice but “X”, and seems to be refuted by the much higher price of “Y”.
I know I’ve said this before–we’ve had this discussion before–but you keep saying you’re pro-transit (maybe also pro-urban? that one I’m not so sure you’ve said, in your defense), while seemingly failing to connect the dots between what you claim to support, what you cite as evidence against what you say you support, and the (should-be-obvious) contingency of everything that constitutes your evidence.
….Mayhaps that is because they are already where they would be taking transit too? I know that people say the MAX is too downtown-centric (to which I have replies), but there is still a lot of stuff there, more than there is any other singular place in the Metro, yet it’s compact enough that walking/biking are also very feasible within it. That all is why the MAX was built the way it was, and not in some other geography.
Bus flexibility is a double-edged sword. Bus lines can move to follow population trends, but that means you can also lose your bus service easily. Just ask residents of SW Portland about that.
Fixed transit encourages dense infill development. Orenco wouldn’t exist if west side MAX had been a BRT line.
No one anywhere is building new trolley buss lines. Why do you think that is?
MAX operating cost per rider is much lower than busses, and maximum capacity is much higher. With the yellow line currently terminating at Expo, a short extension across the new bridge makes a lot of sense. Tearing out MAX lines to install trolley bus lines is an insane idea.
This is categorically false. While no cities in the US area building new trolley bus lines, new systems and lines are being built globally. Mexico City opened line 10 in 2022. Italian cities have opened lines/systems in 2023 (Avellino), 2021 (Rimini), 2017 (Bologna) and far more. Zurich opened a new line in 2015, and Prague re-introduced trolleybuses in 2017. Shanghai is expanding their trolleybus network, and Marrakesh opened a BRT line with trolleybuses in 2017.
Modern bi-mode trolleybuses with small batteries for flexible off-wire operation are incredibly practical, zero emission, reliable transit options. Now, I obviously think replacing the MAX with trolleybuses is silly, but replacing TriMet’s BEB only approach to bus electrification with a blended approach of trolleybuses on routes with a high density of demand and many stops (think the 14, 15 and 75) makes legitimate sense.
Cambridge MA recently stopped using their system, replacing their fleet with battery powered buses.
That’s not a positive development. The battery powered buses don’t have the capacity to meet the range demands of the bus service in cold weather (which is common in New England). The purposed solution is big diesel powered heaters to warm the buses when parked, hopefully extendeding their range. Battery powered bus service will be substantially more emissions producing than the trolley buses that are being replaced.
There are use cases in which battery powered buses make sense. Replacing legacy wired buses is not one of those cases.
What a great comment, thanks for highlighting it!
Imagine if ODOT was actually trying to expand a freeway instead of fix one of the worst bottlenecks on the entire west coast– a few hundred feet of one lane.
Where were the activists when ODOT made similar improvements to I-205? They were silent because their concerns rarely radiate beyond the echo chamber of their gentrified inner neighborhoods.
But ask them about the Rose Quarter project and they’ll act like the sky is falling: invoke children, POC, the homeless, whatever emotional appeal they can throw at it.
It’s pure theater.
Let the work commence. Find a real problem to solve. Your entitlement is showing, and it’s rather embarrassing.
There you go again with that ridiculously unfounded “worst bottleneck on the west coast” line. Just because consultants working for odot have slipped that claim into presentation materials and fed it to local reporters and politicians (without ever explaining what it is supposed to mean or what metric they are using) doesn’t make it true.
“worst … bottlenecks…” is an IBR trope that the IBR dunces says every chance they get. It is not original to Rockshoxworthy.
https://www.interstatebridge.org/case4IBR – bottom of the page…
https://www.interstatebridge.org/case4IBR#:~:text=Over%20143%2C000%20vehicles,due%20to%20congestion.
And here is the truth from 2019:
https://www.columbian.com/news/2019/feb/12/report-i-5-bridge-is-nations-29th-worst-bottleneck/
The Interstate 5 Bridge ranks as the nation’s 29th worst bottleneck on a top 100 list and the worst in Washington, according to American Transportation Research Institute findings issued….
…traveling on the I-5 Bridge between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. traffic flows at 50 mph to 55 mph. Traveling outside that window, as any veteran I-5 Bridge driver knows, and you’re taking your chances. The slowest average speeds, the institute says, are at about 8 a.m. with an average speed between 30 mph and 35 mph and at 6 to 7 p.m. with an average speed of 35 mph. The overall average speed on the span is 41.2 mph.
https://truckingresearch.org/
When someone portrays the most expensive transport project in Oregon’s history – likely ten billion dollars and a third of metro-region’s transport budget for a generation – and five miles of highway expansion including seven new highway interchanges as “a few hundred feet of one lane” they may…. not interested in the truth.
It also won’t fix the bottleneck, as the project’s own DEIS demonstrates.
Jeff Rockshoxworthy, but a little more transparent.
Yes. It is our duty to appease the car gods. Their tires demand sacrifice. The traffic must flow.
Tyros, Elaion, and even lesser-known Mekhos! Quiver and bow to their wrath. All pay tribute to the asphalt and its containers!
The activists were loud about I205 too, which any quick viewing of the No More Freeways website makes clear. This is just laughably wrong.
Can’t wait til they fix the “bottleneck” at the Rose Quarter and the “bottleneck” at the bridge so they can move on to fixing the “bottleneck” at the 405 interchange and then fix the “bottleneck” in the central eastside until they eventually fix the “bottleneck” that is the street outside my house. The traffic must flow.
The freeway must expand to accommodate the expanding freeway!
Yes, regional travel demand models forecast trips based on forecasted growth in jobs and population. Then they are measured against the existing network as well as the planned regional transportation projects, programs, etc. These come from each of the jurisdictions TIP’s (transportation improvement programs), e.g. – the six-year near-term transportation project list stemming from the transportation system plan or other planning projects. So it’s not really Metro that needs to fix their inputs into the model, it’s that all those jurisdictions need to put different transportation projects in their 6 year plans that shift mode choice, because those projects are what feed into the Metro model in terms of how the trips are going to move through the system.
This is the Metro game—pass the blame.
Through the RTP process and call for projects Metro solicits and evaluates projects for inclusion. It’s on Metro (the only organization that coordinates on the regional level) to make sure the cumulative impact of the solicited projects meet the RTP vision, goals, targets, and policies. This includes not allowing projects in that make it more challenging to hit targets. (link to an RTP doc explaining the process, though I suspect Dear Commenter is familiar) As one of the holders of the purse strings for distribution of federal dollars for transportation projects in the region (like IBR and Rose Quarter), Metro needs to be a better gate keeper.
To be fair, the absence of any actual statewide strategy to reduce driving (RIP RMPP; Road User Charge TBD) isn’t helping. But right now Metro’s model assumes these things (in some form) will exist and it’s still leading to bad funding outcomes.
The reason we have MPOs is to look after collective problems that can’t (or won’t) be solved at a municipal level. Metro does have the ability to exercise influence here and it should. No one else is going to do it.
Rep Pham has been great on the other needed approach to this problem—adjusting the ORLeg funding picture and priorities—making effective arguments about opportunity cost and bringing in other statewide priorities to the discussion, including addressing other transportation needs (safety, rural transit) that might have more lasting and meaningful impact than saving commuters a few minutes.
RE: Metro’s potential for influence, I’ll quote former Metro Councilor Robert Liberty from his testimony last time Metro passed up its opportunity to influence the project:
“There’s pressure to go along to get along. I know it feels like if you vote No you won’t get invited to junkets or conferences or sit on esteemed panels for projects and you won’t get reelected. That your colleagues sitting next to you will be angry with you and won’t talk to you. But I voted No when it was unpopular to do so and not much changed for me. I got reelected and the Council President later told me they thought I had voted correctly.”
And here are our current Metro councilors “go[ing] along to get along”, contorting logic, trading their influence for… nothing, even when they knew better, voting 6-1 to fund IBR.
“I wasn’t here, I have to trust past work…I don’t see a path to starting over.”
“I want to move forward but don’t want to rush a decision…an extremely reluctant “Aye””
“This is a better project than the CRC.”
“I want to operate in an abundance mindset…we can build all of these projects at once.”
“This is our best chance.”
Including Juan Carlos “I will no longer support any fossil fuel highway infrastructure projects, unless ODOT and the state legislature prioritize heavily investing in our region’s orphan highways” Gonzales.
By the by, as a constituent of theirs, Mary Nolan for Immortal God Emperor of Metro!
Another example of why engineers should learn the fundamentals of science and engineers in the field should be rewarded for disproving inaccurate models. Current incentives reward bad models.
The models are easy to “disprove” — everyone knows they’re highly imperfect. Recent declines in Portland population were not part of the model assumptions, for example.
The question is not whether the models omniscient, but how to better forecast future demand.
ODOT parades these fake numbers around the state without blushing and the legislature accepts them as gospel when they burn transportation funds on mega projects instead of maintenance.
The problem they face is that they need to build for a future decades or more out, rather than merely react, and that requires a certain about of forecasting and decision making based on imperfect (and often wrong) information. They need to decide something (what to build, or not to build at all), and any decision they make is vulnerable to the “imperfect knowledge of the future” criticism.
It’s like weather forecasting — often wrong, but much better than nothing.
They do not communicate the uncertainty in their projections and they pick the outcomes that bring them the biggest budget. They are not helpless and earnestly trying their best.
Weather forecasting is a terrible analogy for traffic modeling, since weather forecasting has no impact on the weather. Traffic modeling does, since it’s used by road authorities to justify projects in at least a mildly self-fulfilling way. If traffic projections say that a road needs to be widened to accommodate, then the road is widened, then traffic increases to take advantage of the increased roadway supply it’s reasonable to say that the projection directly influenced the future outcome.
Weather forecasting is also far, far more accurate. It’s not even close really.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”― Upton Sinclair
Traffic demand models are designed specifically to support political agendas. They always have been and they always will.
Congress has mandated a process whereby states and localities are rewarded for expanding roadway capacity. As long as this regime of roadway capacity expansion-rewarding continues, all DOTs within the USA will follow this mindset. You can go ahead and blame the political party of your choice but the fact remains that this is the regime and that a majority of all senators and representatives from both parties have voted in favor of it since at least 1956 (and likely earlier under Robert Moses), and so it remains. It won’t change, and neither will the travel demand models, until congress rewards states and localities big time for reducing VMT, stroadway car capacity, and so on, more than it does capacity expansion.
Metro does what it is told to do, by Congress, by the feds, by the states, by it’s localities, and by the idiots who keep electing the other idiots to office. Only idiots keep electing the same clowns to office and expect different results.
I think its a mistake to blame Metro transportation model on elected officials. As Jarret Walker points out this is a general problem with the profession.
I remember the last I5 bottleneck that ODOT fixed 20 years ago.That was widening I5 at Lombard to eliminate a “bottleneck”. The ODOT modeling for that widening claimed it would result in LESS traffic at the Rose Quarter and on the Fremont Bridge.
You might wonder how they arrived at that conclusion. The answer was because they included all the Region’s planned transportation projects. The reduction in traffic resulted from the plans for massive investments in transit that would produce an equally massive increase in transit use.
I think the problem is not really with the models, although Jarret seems to think they can be improved. I think the problem is using them to drive the project, instead of as one very fuzzy point of reference. Because basically you can get the model to tell you what you want it to and there are plenty of people who know how to manipulate the regional plans to fit their agenda.
Lots of the folks who advocated for high transit usage in the plans had no inkling that they could be used to model a freeway expansion that would reduce traffic. It clearly refuted the argument that you were just moving the bottleneck to the Rose Quarter.
Another good example is the Sunset Freeway. It used to be 4 lanes up and over Sylvan. Good thing they widened it to 6 lanes and fixed that traffic problem! /s
The best thing t hey did in the 90s was building west side MAX. At least we have options now.
AND added guaranteed bike access across the Willamette bridges in the 90s! (Go Mia et al!)
I don’t think it is too much to ask elected officials to be critical of predictive models. Peterson has a background and more than 20 years of experience that gives her the tools to understand the faults of these models and others should know that they are signing up for a job that requires data interpretation. Likewise, in the legislature, Lew Fredrick and others have been on the transportation committee long enough to know how this works.
They know the problems with these models and they use those inaccuracies as cover. Then you have Gonzalez that ran on a climate platform and turned out to be a total shill. Metro is failing.
I read ITOTS’s comment, then took that information along with a critical eye to the SDEIS. Reading through the Transportation section, I realized that the authors were still assuming the Metro modeling as valid despite the fact that one of the RTP’s major demand management projects, the I-5 & I-205 Regional Mobility Pricing Program, was scuttled by Gov. Kotek earlier this year. I left a comment calling that assumption out and insisting the SDEIS investigate the effects of that change, and I encourage others to do so as well.
Remember that an environmental impact statement is a legal document. It’s supposed to consider all reasonably foreseeable environmental impacts of a particular project in order to inform the ultimate decision (which is recorded in a Record of Decision). An effective comment doesn’t say that the analysis is wrong because the methodology is wrong, because there’s a presumption that the expert consultants contributing to the analysis are better positioned to evaluate the work than a random member of the public making a comment. Rather, you should be specifically showing what pieces of information haven’t been considered that should be included in the report. Otherwise, the comment responders will simply brush your comment off with a “this has been considered on page xxx” and move on.
The obvious solution to the Columbia Crossing and I-5 bottleneck is to have hundreds of Frog Ferries all along the Columbia and Williamette.
What ever happened with just replacing the bridge because it’s old and decrepit? ODOT think they need a bunch of extra stuff along with it because of an imaginary “bottleneck”?
No wonder nothing gets done in this state on time and under budget.
The replacement bridge should have been under construction years ago.
While the bridge is old, apparently it isn’t actually decrepit. The original builders overbuilt it, which was typical back then – many such bridges are still in use all over the country. The cost of upgrading the current bridges to modern standards to survive a major earthquake was around $100 million in 2010, I’m sure it has risen since, but still well-below $200 million.